An American commentator for Russian television who was indicted during the Biden administration as part of an effort to combat Moscow’s propaganda filed a legal motion on Monday to dismiss the charges on First Amendment grounds.
Dimitri K. Simes, who was an adviser to Donald J. Trump’s first presidential campaign, and his wife, Anastasia Simes, were charged in 2024 with violating U.S. economic sanctions against Russia for their work for a state-owned television network.
In addition to the indictment against Mr. Simes, the Biden administration brought charges against two employees of a Russian broadcaster who were accused of funneling money to right-wing, pro-Trump influencers.
The Biden administration implemented a range of measures to counter foreign efforts to influence American politics and issued warnings about Russian disinformation. The administration also issued warnings about faked videos and other Russian propaganda aimed at undermining faith in U.S. elections or fostering political division.
But the Trump administration has significantly scaled back much of the previous government’s work, which it views as an attempt to infringe on free speech and silence conservative voices.
Despite Mr. Trump’s rollback of his predecessor’s efforts, questions remain about where the line between foreign malign influence and freedom of speech lies.
In a lengthy interview from Moscow, where he now lives permanently, Mr. Simes asserted his innocence. His lawyers say the law the Biden administration used to prosecute him was never meant to curb free expression.
“No one disputes the government’s right to impose economic sanctions on the Russian economy,” said Michel Paradis, a lawyer for Mr. Simes. “But prosecuting an American journalist because he reports for a Russian television channel is just censorship.”
Mr. Simes, who immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union in the 1970s, first came to prominence as an adviser to Richard Nixon. From 1994 to 2022, Mr. Simes served as the head of a think tank Mr. Nixon founded that is now known as the Center for the National Interest.
During the 2016 election, Mr. Simes hosted Mr. Trump for one of his few major foreign policy addresses.
Mr. Simes was also named in the Mueller report investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, but the report ultimately exonerated him, finding that there was not evidence that the Trump campaign had received messages from the Russian government through Mr. Simes.
Mr. Simes, who is now 78 and holds both Russian and American citizenship, said he believed that the Biden administration’s antipathy had its roots in the allegations that he had been involved in efforts by Russia to contact the Trump campaign.
Mr. Simes said he remained deeply critical of American support for Ukraine and the Biden administration’s response to the Russian invasion.
But he argues he is not a propagandist. He said he had invited critics of Russia’s war in Ukraine on his television show and had asked tough questions of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.
“I continue to feel that a great injustice was done to me,” Mr. Simes said in the interview. “I think that this is a very dangerous precedent. The United States has a free press.”
Mr. Simes learned of the legal action against him in 2024 when his wife’s friend, who was house-sitting in their Virginia home, called to say there were 40 people on the premises and the F.B.I. said they were conducting a search. Ironically, Mr. Simes said, one of the items seized by the F.B.I. was a Russian icon his mother, a Russian human rights lawyer, had received from the dissident Andrei Sakharov.
In addition to the main indictment, Anastasia Simes was also accused of helping a Russian businessman evade sanctions by purchasing art and antiques for him. Their lawyers made a separate motion on Monday to dismiss the charges against her.
Mr. Simes acknowledged that his view of the Russian invasion was out of step with many Americans, and certainly the Biden administration. But he said his perspectives on Russia were not always the minority opinion, and that American politics had taken a more hostile view of Mr. Putin. Now, anyone suggesting a more positive attitude about Russia is called a Putin apologist, he added.
Evelyn Douek, an associate processor at Stanford Law School, said she had initially been skeptical of Mr. Simes’s legal claims but that his arguments were stronger than she had expected. She said his basic premise that the U.S. government cannot use economic sanctions against journalistic entities to “prevent the spread of propaganda” was correct.
“It’s a really important and fundamental principle because one person’s propaganda is another person’s political argument,” she said. “If the government could term anything as propaganda and ban it, that would give it enormous, dangerous power over the public sphere.”
Courts, however, often give deference to the government’s national security arguments. So it is possible that judges will give more weight to the payments the Russian broadcaster gave to Mr. Simes and less to his free speech concerns.
In the indictment, the government said that the television station Mr. Simes worked for had been placed under sanctions by the United States, and that his salary was deposited in a Russian bank that had also been sanctioned.
The government argued that Mr. Simes knew that the television network, Channel One, was under sanctions and that posed problems for his continued work for it. At the time of the indictment, Mr. Simes had earned $1 million from the station since it had been placed under sanctions, the government said.
But the case was always about more than sanctions violations. The indictment argues Mr. Simes received instructions from the Russian government about how to describe developments in the war to minimize Ukrainian successes.
Mr. Simes’s lawyers say that however compelling the national security interest was in imposing economic sanctions on Russia, “singling out American journalists for felony prosecutions” is not reasonably related to that goal.
What is more, Mr. Simes’s legal motion notes, the law he is being prosecuted under protects speech, prohibiting the government from regulating or barring the import or export of any “information or informational materials.”
Mr. Simes argues he was free to argue what he wanted on the show and that he offered his own perspective, not propaganda.
“I was hosting a nightly analytical program right after the news,” he said. “I thought it was a kind of inevitable that there would be a lot of critical attention to me in Washington. What I did not expect was that this critical attention would lead to a criminal indictment, particularly to an indictment of money laundering.”
Ms. Douek said that the Biden administration’s work to counter foreign malign influence and the right-wing backlash to those efforts have been a big theme in American politics. But it is a complicated politics: Even as officials in the Trump administration defend free speech, they have also tried to stamp out commentary they do not like, such as criticism of Charlie Kirk after his assassination.
“This moment highlights the importance of the First Amendment protections against the government efforts to crack down on whatever it wants to call propaganda,” Ms. Douek said. “Because once you give that power to the government, you don’t get to choose which government gets to wield that power.”
